The Birth of a Podcast
If you’ve been following this blog, you may have noticed that I’m touching on a number of topics that essentially fall within three key categories: small business, writing, search engine optimization – and they all are in pursuit of quality marketing for your company. It’s the typical story of ‘tell what you know’. I’ve been in a wonderfully, euphoric experimental phase with my own marketing over the past few months and want to share what I’ve learned with you so that you might feel confident trying new things to make your company even more successful. If I can do it, you can do it.
One of the recommendations for quality SEO is to offer a variety of media on your website. This is actually a good idea for the general readership, which may be one of the reasons it’s good for optimizing your site. An interesting website will compel visitors to stay longer, right? In keeping with that philosophy, I’ve decided to put together a limited series of podcasts on topics of interest to small business owners. So here’s what I did.
First, I contacted Donna Papacosta who is an expert in this field and has extensive podcast information on her website at Trafalgar Communications. She patiently guided me through the various steps necessary to produce a podcast. I had some decisions to make regarding recording equipment, content, length and music. I also had to decide if it was something I wanted to attempt myself, or if I wanted to hire Donna to produce the podcasts. In my mind, there were too many ways I could make mistakes and end up with an amateurish sounding recording, so I chose to hire the professional.
I determined what topics I wanted for each of the podcasts and who would be the ideal interviewee for each. They were all receptive to being interviewed for this project, so I set up the interviews and forwarded a list of questions to each of them so they would be able to think about their answers.
The equipment I chose was a Logitech microphone. Not terribly high tech, but it seemed to do the job when used in conjunction with my netbook and Sennheiser headphones. Actually, that made a pretty decent little mobile audio recording setup. One interview was conducted in my office, another was done at my colleagues office. I didn’t have much control over the recording levels so they weren’t optimum, but they worked well enough to serve my purposes. A third interview was conducted online using Pamela for Skype. That one saved a bunch of travel time.
Donna introduced me to shockwave-sound where I perused some of the intro music that could have been used for the piece. We didn’t end up going with any of them for this project, but I heard several that I liked quite a bit and now am pleased to have this resource in my toolkit.
Next, the introduction and call to action needed to be written and provided to Donna so she could record the voice over and package the podcast together. She was able to edit and equalize the audio recording I provided and compile everything into a professional podcast.
There are still some bits and pieces to take care of such as getting a transcript done and setting up where you can download from the website. I’ll update this post as soon as that is complete.
Bottom line? If you have an idea that you think will benefit your audience, give it a try yourself or find an expert who can help guide you through the process. Get creative!
